Susan Goodwillie Edwards

Susan Edwards was born to Rosella Smalldon Goodwillie and John Erwin Goodwillie in Manhattan, later spending early years alongside her younger brother John in Wisconsin. Their father was an engineer and a vice president at Beloit Ironworks, having relocated the family from New York City during the Depression. Susan attended Milwaukee Downer Seminary High School, Swarthmore College and Wellesley College, graduating from Wellesley in 1952. As a young mother she returned to school to earn a master’s degree in English Literature at Manhattanville College (now University) in Purchase, New York.

Susan married George Rowe, Jr. in 1954 and they had three children: Julia, Katharine and John, living in a suburb of New York for a decade and a half until the marriage ended in divorce. In 1973 Susan married John C. Edwards and moved to Newmarket, New Hampshire where John was the Director of the University of New Hampshire’s Theater Department and Susan taught in the English Department.

A joyful, generous and curious person, Susan was as delighted by the antics of a small child as by the work of a great master. She was attuned to music, theater, the visual arts, and dance—in particular, she really knew her way around a watercolor. However, writing was her central focus. Her much beloved first job after college was as assistant to Katharine White, fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine. Much of her subsequent professional life revolved around writing, teaching, and editing. Throughout her career she published reviews and feature articles in publications such as the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times and during her years in New York she was on the editorial board of The New York Quarterly, a poetry journal.

Susan herself was an accomplished poet. The natural world, humor and loss all are present in her work. Blizzards of birds sweep through the poems, birch leaves, “coins of capsulated light” make their obedient drift downwards, and Bach and Mendelssohn rescue her and John from the poisonous air of Leipzig in 1986. In one piece she encodes hostage terror into a villanelle.

As many of her poems reveal, Susan relished her years in New England. Accompanied by a succession of well-loved dogs, she and John lived in a light-filled glass and wood house they designed, high in the treetops overlooking the Lamprey River. There, they hosted weddings and parties, followed abundant wildlife, and marveled at the crackle and thunder of river ice as it broke up every spring. Susan sang in the Rockingham Choral Society, participated in poetry workshops, read books and shared puzzles with her grandchildren, and sailed with her husband around the Isle of Shoals.

Beyond New Hampshire, Susan and John traveled widely and often, and they eagerly embraced UNH’s Global Partners program, enjoying year-long postings at Cambridge University, Kobe University in Japan and at Regent’s College in London. These experiences resonated throughout the rest of their lives.

In 2014 Susan and John moved to Fleet Landing, a retirement community in Atlantic Beach, Florida where they could be near Susan’s daughter Kate Rowe and family. There, John and Susan enjoyed the Jacksonville Symphony, Susan found an accomplished group of poets, while John baked popovers and coached local theater groups.

Susan was predeceased by her brother who died in 2022, and by John, who died 2018. In addition to Kate and her husband Andrew Buchwalter, Susan is survived by son John Rowe and his wife Ann Rowe, daughter Julia Rowe and husband Ron Kahn, stepson Jack Edwards and wife Lisa Kraus, stepdaughter Susan Rowlett and husband Bernard Rowlett, grandchildren Samuel and Julian Buchwalter, Katharine Sierchio and John Rowe, step-grandchildren Nina, Dagny and Elijah Edwards, Chelsea Rowlett and great-step-grandson Malakai Pruitt.

In lieu of flowers, donations to RAIN for the Sahel and Sahara (https://rain4sahara.org) or to the New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (https://nhspca.org) would be welcome.